Monday, 25 January 2016

Hitchcock/Truffaut
is a 2015 French-American documentary film directed by Kent Jones
about François Truffaut's book on Alfred Hitchcock,
Hitchcock/Truffaut, and its impact on cinema.

Truffaut interviewed
Hitchcock over eight days in 1962 at his offices at Universal Studios
to write his book, and the documentary features reflections from
directors including James Gray, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Wes
Anderson, David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin, and Olivier Assayas.

It was first
screened at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was shown in the TIFF
Docs section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

Directed by Kent
Jones

Produced by Charles
S. Cohen

Olivier Mille

Written by Kent
Jones

Serge Toubiana

Based
on Hitchcock/Truffaut

by François
Truffaut

Starring Alfred
Hitchcock

François Truffaut

Music by Jeremiah
Bornfield

Cinematography Nick
Bentgen

Daniel Cowen

Eric Gautier

Mihai Malaimare Jr.

Lisa Rinzler

Genta Tamaki

Edited by Rachel
Reichman

Distributed by Cohen
Media Group

Release dates

19 May 2015 (Cannes)

2 December 2015 (US)

Running time

79 minutes

Country France

United States

Language English

French

Japanese

Hitchcock/Truffaut
is a 1966 book by François Truffaut about Alfred Hitchcock,
originally released in French as Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock.

First published by
Éditions Robert Laffont, it is based on a 1962 exchange between
Hitchcock and Truffaut, in which the two directors spent a week in a
room at Universal Studios talking about movies. After Hitchcock's
death, Truffaut updated the book with a new preface and final chapter
on Hitchcock's later films.

The book is the
inspiration for the 2015 documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut.

In Hitchcock, film
critic François Truffaut presents fifty hours of interviews with
Alfred Hitchcock about the whole of his vast directorial career, from
his silent movies in Great Britain to his color films in Hollywood.
The result is a portrait of one of the greatest directors the world
has ever known, an all-round specialist who masterminded everything,
from the screenplay and the photography to the editing and the
soundtrack. Hitchcock discusses the inspiration behind his films and
the art of creating fear and suspense, as well as giving strikingly
honest assessments of his achievements and failures, his doubts and
hopes. This peek into the brain of one of cinema’s greats is a
must-read for all film aficionados.

“Psycho” (1960)
was the first film I saw in a movie theater, an experience that my
7-year-old self was ill-equipped to parse. Surrounded by jittery
adults, I puzzled over everything, and not just the frantic screaming
that mimicked Bernard Herrmann’s devilishly clever musical cues.
Why, I wondered, was Janet Leigh wandering around in her bra in the
middle of the afternoon?

That juxtaposing of
sex and terror was as essential to Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic
style as his meticulous deployment of icy blond actresses.
Disappointingly, Kent Jones’s documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut”
— though not nearly as dry as its title — barely tickles
Hitchcock’s fascinating fetishes. Despite a promising nod to the
brilliant perversions of “Marnie” and “Vertigo” (which few
can deny is one terrifically sick movie), Mr. Jones remains rigidly
focused on hammering home the director François Truffaut’s
motivation for writing the 1966 book on which this film is based: To
lead Hitchcock, then widely considered a mere commercial entertainer,
out of the shoals of populism and into the cineaste spotlight.
Truffaut knew that hindsight was better than no sight at all.

Just as a snooty
reader might be enticed to the novels of Stephen King by a thumbs-up
from The New York Review of Books, movie buffs were likely to view
Truffaut’s enthusiasm for Hitchcock as a sufficient entree to their
discerning fold. But the book, an engrossing record of Truffaut’s
dayslong interview with his idol in 1962, did more than just
reposition its subject’s reputation. It also provided riveting
insight into the art and craft of moviemaking, revealing Hitchcock’s
mastery of time and space and his unwavering preference, honed by his
period of making silent movies, for image over dialogue.

Curating a selection
of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn
near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s
entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter
noncinephiles. Bob Balaban’s intermittent narration is soft and
unintrusive, and a chorus of lauded directors, mostly American and
all male (I can’t help thinking that a woman might have dug deeper
into the significant contributions of Hitchcock’s wife and
collaborator, Alma Reville), chime in with acuity and ardor.

What they don’t do
is show how their own movies might have been influenced by
Hitchcock’s technique, which Mr. Jones lovingly illustrates in
dissections of a few of the master’s most memorable scenes. Though
merely a tasting menu, these moments add jolts of pulpy fun and allow
their creator to speak for himself. The man who embraced many of the
characteristics that movie snobs love to denigrate — his genre; his
prolific output (at the time of the interview, he was just completing
his 48th film); the constraints of the studio system — is finally
his own best argument for the happy coexistence of art and
entertainment.